Page 147 of The Ragpicker King
Andreyen held up a hand, as if to stop her talking. “Lin—”
“We are going to have to find another way,” she said. “To stop Malgasi. To help Kel—”
“Lin.” Andreyen cut his eyes sideways, and Lin realized that there was someone else in the room. He had been sitting in an armchair facing Andreyen, which is why she had not seen him; now he rose to his feet and turned to face her.
Her breath hissed out of her in a shocked exhale. “Exilarch.”
Aron Benjudah regarded her from across the Great Room. He wore his Rhadanite traveler’s linens and looked much as he had the first time she’d seen him. Only then he had been in the Shulamat, in a world in which the black straps around his arms, the Evening Sword at his hip, the dark markings on his skin, were expected. Here he seemed wildly out of place, the sight of him a sort of shock, as if she’d come across a basilisk in Fleshmarket Square.
He nodded stiffly. “Lin.”
“How did you know where I was?” she said, her gaze darting to Andreyen, then to Ji-An and Merren. Merren shrugged, palms up, as if to say he’d no idea and doubted the others did, either.
“Your grandfather,” said Aron. “He understood it was important that I speak with you.”
She felt a brief surge of almost painful hope. “Has the Maharam changed his mind about my exile?”
There was a flash of something like pity in Aron’s eyes, and she hated him for it. “The Maharam is not one to change his mind,” he said, and looked at Andreyen, whose green eyes were blazing. “You remain exiled.”
Disappointment laced her voice with bitterness. “Then you shouldn’t be here,” she said. “Speaking to an exile is forbidden even to the Exilarch, I imagine.”
“There are some things more important than the Maharam and even the Law,” Aron said. There was something in his voice Lin had never heard before. Unease, hesitancy—even something like desperation. It wasn’t a tone she’d ever have expected from the Exilarch. She half expected him to tell her something terrible: that something had happened to Mariam—that the cure she had effected had not been permanent. That Mayesh had been lying, and that when the wall of the Sault had collapsed, someone had been hurt, even killed.
Instead, Aron crossed the room to her. She almost flinched away from the intensity in his eyes, the emotions that seemed to pour off him like water. To her shock, he dropped to his knees in front of her, his head lowered, his hands extended toward her, palms up.
“I acknowledge you,” Aron said, “as the Goddess who has been promised. And I present myself as your guardian, as my ancestor Judah Makabi guarded the Shekinah Adassa during the fall of Aram.”
Lin felt numb. This was the very last thing she would have expected him to say, and now that he’d said it, she had no idea how to feel. “What?” she said, feeling foolish for not having a more composed, Goddess-like reaction. “Now?”
He remained on his knees, but looked up slowly, as if he could not quite believe the sight of her. “I have been blind,” he said. “I have been blind because it served me to be blind. For years, I have tested those claiming to be the Goddess, and each time I met a new claimant, I hoped for it—for that sense of recognition that was promised to me. That when I saw her, I would know her. I haveawaited that knowing and have felt nothing. I grew used to that lack of feeling, and when I met you, I saw you with the eyes of my mind, not of my heart. I was determined to doubt, and so I doubted.”
Lin remained stock-still, barely able to breathe. She was waiting for him to stop, to stand up, to laugh and say he was only mocking her, that he’d come to ensure she knew how far from the light of the Goddess she truly was.
But he didn’t. “When you healed Mariam,” he said, “I saw a fire within you. I saw the tower burning. I was myself and I was also my own ancestor, looking up at the tower, seeing the Goddess at work. I felt what he felt. I felt that sense of knowing. I felt a perfect faith, a perfect rightness. I could not have described the feeling ahead of time, but now that I know it, it is undeniable. You are the Ancient of Days. You will change the course of history. The Maharam does not see it, but he is a small and petty man. I see it. Iknow.”
“I am not sure,” Lin whispered, “that I am worthy of a perfect faith. I do not even have perfect faith in myself.”
“That is because you are not ready,” said Aron. “The destruction you caused in the Sault was because you have not yet connected to your full, true power. It was a lack of control, and that is what you next must master. The ordeal will grant you that control.”
“What ordeal?” said Merren. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
Lin had nearly forgotten that he and Ji-An were there. Both were looking at Aron warily. Andreyen’s expression as he gazed at the Exilarch was unreadable.
“The Ordeal of Bitter Water,” said Aron. “It will connect the Goddess Returned to her Source-Stone. Having passed through the ordeal, she will rise up in fire and power. She will be invincible.”
And Lin remembered suddenly what she had read:The magician and the stone must then travel together to the caves of Sulemon, where, having passed the Halls of Hewn Stone, the gem must be cleansed in the Place of Bitter Water before it being bound unto the Sorcerer whose power it will hold.
But that had been a thousand years ago, when she had beendetermined beyond reason to master magic, to cure Mariam. And she had done it. Mariam was well now. She was no magician, whatever Aron might say. She had tried to compass magic and had nearly lost everything. Her home, her best friend, her community.
“What are you asking of me?” she said, almost in a whisper. “No one believes I am the Goddess. Will this ordeal force that faith upon them? Perhaps all you saw in the Shulamat was the power of my Source-Stone. Perhaps the Maharam is right. The Goddess would not return in such a weak vessel.”
Slowly, the Exilarch rose to his feet. Without taking his gaze from hers, he said, “Asher. Tell her.”
Lin’s head spun. Did he mean Asher Benezar, the Maharam’s son? Why was he invoking the name of someone exiled so long ago?
The Ragpicker King sighed. “I am not sure she can be convinced, Aron. Lin is very stubborn.”
Lin stared at him. “Asher?” she whispered.
